Feelings and Illusions

The Dalai Lama has said that Buddhism and science are deeply compatible and has encouraged Western scholars to critically examine both the meditative practice and Buddhist ideas about the human mind. A number of scientists and philosophers have taken up this challenge. There have been brain scans of meditators and philosophical examinations of Buddhist doctrines. There have even been discussions of Darwin and the Buddha: Do early Buddhist descriptions of the mind, and of the human condition, make particular sense in light of evolutionary psychology?
This course will examine how Buddhism is faring under this scrutiny. Are neuroscientists starting to understand how meditation “works”? Would such an understanding validate meditation—or might physical explanations of meditation undermine the spiritual significance attributed to it? And how are some of the basic Buddhist claims about the human mind holding up? We’ll pay special attention to some highly counterintuitive doctrines: that the self doesn’t exist, and that much of perceived reality is in some sense illusory. Do these claims, radical as they sound, make a certain kind of sense in light of modern psychology? And what are the implications of all this for how we should live our lives? Can meditation make us not just happier, but better people?
All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.

教學方

Robert Wright

Visiting Lecturer

腳本

In this segment of lecture one, I'm going to talk a little about our feelings, our emotions, and I'm going to do that from two perspectives. From the perspective of Buddhism, and then also from the perspective of evolution. In other words, in the perspective of somebody who's trying to figure out you know, why our feelings have certain properties. Why evolution created them that way. And here I'm kind of jumping ahead to things we're going to cover in greater detail later in the course, but I did want to give you a taste of them. For one thing I wanted to give you a sense for kind of some of the practical payoff for meditation, and also the sense for some of the larger themes that lie ahead. Now a few months ago I was in Vienna in Austria at a big conference on interfaith dialogue. And there were people from all kinds of religions there, and one of them was a Buddhist Nun named Yifa, YIFA, from Taiwan. In fact she is a pretty prominent Buddhist Nun. She has written books about Buddhism. And I found myself talking to her. And we got to talking about meditation. And I asked her if I could videotape her. Because I knew I was going to be teaching this course. And I thought I'd like to share some of her thoughts with you. And she said sure. And so I pulled out my cell phone. And I pressed record. And I asked her how can meditation change the way you view your feelings. And, here's what she said. >> When you act angry or, you know, you have a great emotion, and you would grasp that feeling as real. But when you are meditating or contemplate on those sensations, the anger, fear, over anxiety and you will find very interesting those things are not real, not concrete. So it's to help you to see the nature of a fear, fear over you know, anxiety or [UNKNOWN], all kinds of, emotion. And you find, it's very different. Like, when you use that kind of, meditative, look, from, kind of from inside. And you make a analysis, kind of a, okay, this is a so called anger. And you find, it's just like you watching movie. The movie it's, its a kind of a, you know, picture by picture in motion. And you, you grasp it as real. But when you you know, take a, a one by one, a piece by piece. It's not real. >> Well, that would be nice, wouldn't it if you could just convince yourself that some of your most troublesome, unpleasant feelings aren't real and kind of liberate yourself from them? Now that does lead to the question what does it even mean to say that feelings are real? You know, after all, isn't the definition of a feeling just this thing we experience, so as long you're, as you're experiencing it, isn't it, isn't it real? Well that's a good question, it's a challenging question and in fact it's so challenging that I think I'll dodge it, for just right now and promise to get back to it later. What I would say for now is that, on the one hand it's not you know, found in core Buddhist doctrine anywhere the assertion that you know, feelings aren't real in so many words. On the other hand, I think there are a lot of Buddhist meditators who would know exactly what Yifa was talking about. And it is part of Buddhist thought, quite explicitly, that our feelings are not reliable guides to reality, in a sense. They're not entirely trustworthy. Okay. And, and meditation is a, is a technique for among other things giving yourself some critical distance from your feelings to avoid being misled by them. Now one reason it matters whether feelings are really reliable is that feelings can influence your perceptions. And your thoughts and, and this is something that becomes more evident through meditation. As you observe your mind, You can realize that this is happening in a subtler way than you had, than you had previously thought. And this kind of influence of feelings on perception and thought is also something that psychologists have paid more attention to recently. And, in fact, there's a, a very interesting experiment about this that that I want to talk about now. What do you see here? Is this a squirrel or is it an alligators head? If it's a squirrel, you see the, that these as the eyes and this is the tail and these as the paws. If you think it's an alligators head emerging from the water, then these are the eyes, this is the snout, and here are the menacing teeth, okay. And so, too for, for this. Is this a rope or a snake? Is this a meat cleaver or a cooking pot? Well you know most people, when they see one of these things they make a snap judgement. What's interesting is what researchers recently found about how you can influence the snap judgements people make. What the researchers did was they showed these three pictures to people for one second and asked them what they saw. But first they exposed these people to one of three different conditions. Either they played kind of happy music Or they played no music. Or they played scary music that sounded like this. [MUSIC] And then they asked them, what did you see here? Now it turns out that the happy music didn't have much of an effect one way or the other compared to just hearing no music. But if you look at these graphs you can see that the scary music had a pronounced effect. So in the case of the snake about 30% of the people who heard no music saw a snake as opposed to a coiled rope. And, and roughly 70% of the people who heard the scary music thought they saw a snake. Now if you ask why is the brain built like this. So that our feelings can influence our perceptions in this way. It might help to kind of, step outside of this contrived laboratory condition. And imagine a, a real-life scenario. Suppose you're about to take a hike, in what you've just learned is rattlesnake terrain and in fact, you've just heard that, that a few weeks ago, someone was bitten by a snake and died. Well, that's going to change your frame of mind. As you take your walk, you're going to be at least modestly fearful and that's going to change the things you pay attention to. the, the Greek the Greek playwright, Sophocles said, to a main who is afraid, everything rustles. And that's very much the idea, you're going to be very attentive to rustling sounds. And, if you hear one, and look down to see what's going on and let's say it turns out it's actually a lizard darting across your path, well it's a good chance, that for a second you're going to actually think it's a snake. Or if you, if there happens to be an actual coiled rope as in that experiment, you would probably interpret that as the snake. Now from natural selection's point of view, this actually makes sense. Right? The, the, these kind of false positives actually make sense. because, you know, it's better safe than sorry. It's, it's, even if you, you jump out of the way 99 times out of 100, and it's not a snake, well, if, if that same fear that made you do that, that made you see a snake that isn't there, makes sure that you jumped out of the way on, on the occasion when the snake is there, well, then all that other trouble, and those other 99 times, was worth it. From natural selection's point of view. Okay. So, this is a reminder that natural selection designs organisms ultimately to do one thing. That is get genes into the next generation. Genetically-based traits that are conducive to getting genes into the next generation and surviving long enough to do that are favored by natural selection. So it's not really high on natural selection's agenda necessarily that we see the world clearly. If it's the case that an illusion, seeing an actual illusion, will help us survive or help us get our genes passed on then that is the tendency that natural selection will favor. So we're not really, our brains aren't built to see the truth per se. Now, a couple bits of nuance I want to add to this. First of all, whenever I saw natural selection, designs, brains, or organisms. Designs should be in quotes, okay. It's, it's kind of a metaphor. Natural selection obviously isn't conscious, but it does, produce organisms that look as if they were designed by a conscious designer to do ultimately one thing, get their genes transmitted. And the second thing I'd add is it, it, it fairly often, you know, is in, in, in our, our interests, even by natural selection's likes to see things clearly. Okay. So, if you ask, why am I not about to, to walk over and run into that wall? The answer is because I see very clearly where the wall is and I have a very healthy aversion to running into walls. And if you ask why, when I leave this building am I not going to get run over by a car, one answer is well, I will hear the cars coming and I will pay a lot of attention to that. But even there, there is a kind of illusion. It turns out that when people hear things, possibly threatening things, coming they actually overestimate how soon they will get there. That seems to built into us and, and actually also into our, our primate relatives. So it seems to be a product of natural selection. And again, it makes sense. It's the better safe then sorry principle. Okay. So the point of this is just to draw one basic parallel. Okay. Buddhism says that we should be skeptical of our feelings. They are not necessarily truthful guides to reality and indeed that we should be skeptical of some of the thoughts and the perceptions that feelings foster. Evolutionary psychology also says a certain kind of skepticism makes sense. Because we are not necessarily designed to see the truth. And in some cases our, our minds are actually designed to see what are literally illusions. Now the stakes of this may not seem especially high. I mean how often do you actually find yourself hiking in, in rattlesnake terrain? But sometimes the stakes are higher. So some other psychologists found that if they show people a scary movie, in this case it was Silence of the Lambs, or show them part of the movie. And then show them pictures of men in a different ethnic group from theirs. These people are more likely to see menacing, angry expressions on the faces of these men than people who have not seen part of the scary movie. And again, you can imagine, you know, as with the rattlesnake illusion, you can imagine this coming in handy. Maybe you're in a, in, in, in kind of a dicey neighborhood, and you get some cues that maybe you should get out of there that creates fear, and the fear makes you kind of hyper vigilant. And maybe even makes you kind of imagine menacing expressions aren't there, but it does do you the service of, of getting you to a safer place. Could work like that. But at the same time, remember that one reason, politicians manipulate the emotions of people when these politicians want to go to war. Is because by manipulating people's emotions, you can change their perceptions, you can change their perception of the people that the politicians want to go to war with. So these things do matter. And it's really worth while to figure out exactly what the interaction is among feelings and thoughts and perceptions, and how collectively they can distort our view of the world. And figure that out is a lot of what this course is about. Now lets go back to square one, in, in the next segment, and look at some Basic Buddhist doctrine. In particular the Buddha's ideas about why people suffer.